Julie Cromwell is a selfish, manipulative, insecure woman, and those are her best qualities. She sets up a fake kidnapping to see if her husband will pay a million dollars for her safe return. Something goes wrong and she winds up dead. This is the first plot twist, but certainly not the last. Enter lead detective Karl Larkin and his partner, Ted Cramer. They are a team who refuses to let sleeping dogs lie. They begin rattling the skeletons in the family's closets. Larkin finds himself bre...

What lengths would you go to avenge your fathers death?Would you take on a billion dollar empire?What if that empire was the music industry?In this new crime thriller fiction series, the vivid imagination of Phillip J Kriz brings the elusive backstage concert experience to life. The Roadie Cartel keeps you on the edge of your seat with a story that combines America's love of going to concerts with its odd obsession with the lavish...

Pundits have long predicted the end of conventional warfare but for the foreseeable future,it is here to stay. Counterinsurgency, guerrilla warfare, terrorism, peace enforcement, policing.All these forms, like conventional warfare, are as old as mankind. Modern militaries claim to beprofessional bodies, responsible for the education, control, and discipline of their members. But at least one aspect of this claim is poorly executed: tactics are not taught to junior lea...

A manager's guide to winning on the business battlefield from one of Fast Company's Fast 50 Innovative LeadersFor the US Army, grace under fire isn't an ideal. It's standard operating procedure. In Winning Under Fire, managers discover Army techniques for managing stress in the heat of battle, and learn how to put them to work in their organizations. Written by a retired Army major who was one of Fast Company's Fast 50 Innovative Leaders ...

A deadlier sequel to 9/11—and the race inside the CIA, FBI, and pentagon to stop itIn 2003, United States intelligence uncovered evidence that al Qaeda had acquired nuclear materials, plotting to smuggle them into American ports. The "Second Wave" threat triggered one of the most urgent and secretive manhunts in United States history.With the cinematic intensity of Zero Dark Thirty and the investigative depth of The Looming Tower, Michael ...

During World War II, Michigan became a temporary home to six thousand German and Italian POWs.At a time of homefront labor shortages, they picked fruit in Berrien County, harvested sugar beets in the Thumb, cut pulpwood in the Upper Peninsula, and maintained parks and other public spaces in Detroit. The work programs were not flawless and not all of the prisoners were cooperative, but many of the men established enduring friendships with their captors. Author Grego...

China's Law of the Sea is the first comprehensive study of the law and geopolitics of China's maritime disputes. It provides a rigorous empirical account of whether and how China is changing "the rules" of international order—specifically, the international law of the sea.Conflicts over specific rules lie at the heart of the disputes, which are about much more than sovereignty over islands and rocks in the South and East China Seas. Instead, the main contests concern the s...

Before the twentieth century ships when relied upon visual signaling, vessels beyond range of sight or a cannon shot, were blind, deaf, and dumb in the dark, making night battles at sea rare, and near always accidental. The introduction of certain technologies like the torpedo, the searchlight, radio, and then radar, transformed naval warfare by making night combat feasible and, in some cases, desirable. The process by which navies integrated these new tools of war and turned the dark into...

In recent years, the theological—and, more specifically, Roman Catholic—question of the supernatural has made an astonishing return from seeming oblivion. David Bentley Hart's You Are Gods presents a series of meditations on the vexed theological question of the relation of nature and supernature. In its merely controversial aspect, the book is intended most directly as a rejection of a certain Thomistic construal of that relation, as well as an argument in favor of a model of nat...

An account of the emergence and development of white consciousness throughout American history.In The Making of White American Identity, Ron Eyerman provides an explanation for how whiteness has become a basis for collective identification and collective action in the United States. Drawing upon his previous work on the formation of African American identity, as well as cultural trauma theory, collective memory, and social movements, he reveals how and und...

They began operations out of England in the spring of '43. They flew their Flying Fortresses almost daily against strategic targets in Europe in the name of freedom. Their astonishing courage and appalling losses earned them the name that resounds in the annals of aerial warfare and made the "Bloody Hundredth" a legend.Harry H. Crosby—soon to be portrayed by Anthony Boyle in the miniseries Masters of the Air developed by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg—arrived with the very...

The late Van Slayden trained on the PT-3 kite-like biplane in 1937, but he learned fighter pilot operations flying "by the seat of his pants," walking away from five crashes. Shortly after the invasion of Normandy, he landed on Utah Beach to help establish a US Army Air Forces' (AAF's) presence in Europe. He flew the P-47 Thunderbolt, a fighter-bomber, in combat over Northern France and commanded the 36th Fighter Group-the "Fightin' 36th-at Batogne, St. Vith, the Bridgehead at Remagen, Ope...